Integrated Modeling of Water-Energy-Food Nexus in the Yangtze River Delta: Status Quo and Sustainability Challenges

The Yangtze River Delta (YRD) is a major economic engine of China. Despite its bountiful natural resources, high population density, urbanization and rapid economic growth have led to increasingly high demand for water, energy and food, thus raising the region’s level of exposure to the risks of water, energy, or food insecurity. To analyze the current situation and identify challenges to resource sustainability, we build an input-output (IO) model for the YRD and link it to existing sector models of water, energy and food. The IO model explicitly represents interdependencies of the sectors including but not limited to water, energy and food, whereas the process-driven sector models provide additional details of spatiotemporal dynamics within each sector. A set of metrics were also designed to quantify the level of sustainability of the water, energy and food sectors in the YRD.